Whereas, 10th Guards Tank Division had raced ahead — wearing out its T-62s and exhausting its men — at breakneck speed investing or bypassing towns and villages, never resting in one place more than a few hours, ninety percent of the rest of Army Group South was, to Babadzhanian’s mounting exasperation crawling, nose to tail in its wake like a huge, bloated, lethargic caterpillar. The trouble was that because he only had transporters for one in four of his main battle tanks the roads all the way back to the border were littered, and sometimes blocked, by broken down T-58s and T-62s, not to mention countless miscellaneous cars, trucks and fuel bowsers. Even though he had known this would happen and he had planned for it — there were fifty salvage and recovery teams led by Red Army combat engineers patrolling the ‘lines of advance’ roads, repairing breakdowns and clearing the way for the endless convoys — Babadzhanian fretted constantly about the slow pace of advance of his main force.
Any kind of guerrilla insurgency, of worse, airstrikes by the Yankees or the British would be a disaster. As it was the sheer weight of his tanks and the volume of vehicle movements over ill-maintained and crumbling roads was destroying the very routes upon which all the ammunition, fuel, food and the thousands of things vital to sustain the drive south depended.
The situation would not be anywhere near as critical if the Red Air Force was doing its job. The useless pricks flew a few token fighter sorties over the line of march; dropped a bomb or two now and then and whined constantly about the ‘lack of forward operating bases’. The Iranians, or perhaps, the Iraqis had shot down a couple of Red Air Force reconnaissance aircraft over the Zagros Mountains three days ago and since then the ‘flyboys’ had virtually given up ‘breaking trail’ for his men on the ground.
The Red Air Force was supposedly subordinate to him in this operation, ‘supposedly’ being the operative clause. He had fired off angry signals to Sverdlovsk, hoping somebody would light a fire under the Red Air Force’s collective arse, but he was not holding his breath waiting for a response.
Babadzhanian leaned over the man at the unsteady plot table.
Viewed from the south Urmia dominated the ground to the north, sitting squarely between the lake on the right and the Zagros Mountains on the left. Presently, the spearhead of 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army was trundling down the road to Miandoab on the right, to the left 50th Airborne Brigade was holding Urmia, albeit taking casualties in the process. Problematically, if the garrison at Urmia had already decamped those casualties were in vain and Babadzhanian probably had armour — granted, a relatively small force — positioned either on his flank or threatening to block the road to Piranshahr.
He cursed under his breath.
He looked up, manufactured a saturnine smile for his men.
“I hate these fucking mountains!” He declared, knowing that he could afford to speak his mind in the company of fighting men such as those who surrounded him.
This prompted half-hearted smirks.
“Right,” Babadzhanian decided. “There ought to be enemy tanks somewhere between here and Urmia. How quickly can you put together a battle group to move up the road to Urmia to seek and destroy them?”
The question was posed with a jovial intensity to the commander of the 10th Guards Tank Division, a man of his own age with a weather-beaten face and a shaven head that exhibited the white, gnarled scars of the day back in 1943 when a single German Tiger tank had knocked out three of the four T-34s of his troop in a clearing in the Taiga outside Kursk. His gunner had put a seventy-five millimetre round through the side of the Nazi behemoth but not before the Tiger’s eighty-eight millimetre canon had put a solid shot into his tank’s engine compartment.
Major General Vladimir Andreyevich Puchkov had been with Babadzhanian in Budapest in 1956, and was one of the trusted veterans whom he had consulted in drawing up the original plan for Operation Nakazyvat. The ‘Piranshahr spearhead’ was safe in Vladimir Puchkov’s calloused hands.
“Urmia’s over a hundred kilometres up the road,” Puchkov thought out aloud. “I don’t have the fuel to get half-way. Not up that road.”
Babadzhanian smiled thinly.
The two men understood each other completely. They were moving through country in which the enemy was everywhere, but nowhere in sufficient strength to mass against the invader. Puchkov’s ‘drive’ up the road towards distant Urmia would be noticed within hours and with a little bit of luck it would release the pressure currently being applied to Kurochnik’s paratroopers in the city. This and the air strikes Babadzhanian was going to demand happen later this afternoon. He was perfectly happy to start shooting Red Air Force officers if that was what it took to get action!
“Just make it look like you mean business, Vladimir Andreyevich.”
“Oh, I’ll do that, sir! I’ll have my boys on the road in two hours,” the commander of the 10th Guards Tank Division promised, a grin forming on his lips and the light of battle glinting in his grey green eyes. For a tanker he was a big man, six feet tall and as broad as a bear. Around him the men of his headquarters staff were smiling.
Babadzhanian saw it and was heartened.
In the Red Army traditionally everything was subservient to discipline; but blind obedience alone was not enough in modern warfare fought on the move with increasingly complex and deadly weapons. By reputation Puchkov was a ruthlessly hard taskmaster. However, like Kurochnik, trapped up in Urmia he was a martinet with a heart of gold whom his men tended to follow with almost suicidal devotion. Like both of his two pugnaciously aggressive subordinates, Babadzhanian too understood that while men would sometimes obey an order to follow one into the jaws of death, only a real leader could persuade them to do it willingly.
Such leaders were scarce in the Red Army, as perhaps they were in any army. When one recognised the abilities of a man such as Kurochnik or Puchkov, Babadzhanian was duty bound to give them the opportunity to express their talents and occasionally, to guard their backs when things went wrong. He had no intention of leaving Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik ‘out on a limb’ at Urmia.
“Carry on,” he said. Babadzhanian did not need to tell Puchkov his business. While he might have specified the strength of the force to be sent, timescales, specific objectives; that was wasting time when one was dealing with a man of Puchkov’s proven professional abilities and experience. The Army Group Commander turned to the communications officer. “Do you have a secure scrambler link to the Air Force?”
Within a minute Babadzhanian was telling the numskull at the other end of the line at the forward Red Air Force Controller Station outside Tabriz exactly what needed to be done before nightfall along the roads into Urmia from both the north and the south.
How was Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik supposed to do his job when the Air Force lacked the gumption to carpet bomb the ground beyond his perimeter? Sometimes, he really did not believe, even after all these years, that he still had to explain these things to the idiots running the Red Air Force.
Slamming down the handset in disgust he shook his head.
“Get me Comrade Major General Kurochnik on the line!”
Babadzhanian drank foul camp fire coffee from a metal mess tin as he waited.